Thirty years ago, Ron and Natalie Daise and their children, Sara and Simeon, beckoned TV viewers: “Come and let’s play together in the bright sunny weather. Let’s all go to Gullah Gullah Island!”
The theme song marked the beginning of every episode of Gullah Gullah Island, a musical children’s television show, based upon an idealized version of the Daise family, that ran on Nick Jr for five seasons from 1994 to 2000. As the family sang in the introduction scene, images of curious hogs, frolicking children, Binyah Binyah – a large, yellow anthropomorphic polliwog who served as the family’s playful companion – and other characters danced across the screen.
The show, heralded for its depiction of a Black, specifically Gullah Geechee, family won multiple accolades including several NAACP Image awards, an Emmy and a Parents’ Choice award. But its impact was most felt by the children who grew up being transported to the magical Gullah Gullah Island, a fictional re-imagining of Saint Helena Island, South Carolina, one of the major islands in the Gullah Geechee corridor. The show was one of a kind in its teachings, encouraging tolerance and cultural preservation in the process.
The Gullah Geechee people are the descendants of Africans who were enslaved on the Sea Island cotton plantations along the south-eastern coast of the US, spanning from North Carolina to Florida. Though their labor has been largely obfuscated, the Gullah Geechee are inextricably linked to the foundation and wealth of the US, as they cultivated and harvested the rice, cotton and indigo that made the region and country wealthy.
Because the plantations on which the Gullah Geechee were enslaved were isolated from the rest of the country, the Gullah Geechee were able to create and maintain a distinct culture, including an English-based creole language that their descendants still speak today.
Presented by Ron and Natalie, the Gullah Gullah Island series was not an anthropological or documentary presentation of Gullah Geechee culture at large. Instead, it shone a light on one specific Gullah Geechee family living and learning in their community. In one episode, for example, Natalie goes to the Charleston market to sell her dolls, which are adorned in vibrant dresses and matching gele, a west African headdress, and to buy sweetgrass baskets, a Gullah Geechee craft.
As in other children’s shows, Gullah Gullah Island also taught standard educational skills like counting. In the Charleston market episode, for instance, the characters James and Marisol count quarters in a song about what the family will buy at the market. But it mainly gave children an early entry point into learning more about Gullah heritage and history. Binyah Binyah, for example, may have been some viewers’ first Gullah phrase. Binyah, or “been here”, means someone who is native to a place.
In the decades since the show’s first airing, Ron and Natalie said, young adults of all races and backgrounds have reached out to them, telling them about how pivotal the show was in their lives. Some older adults have told the family that they were able to experience a second childhood through the series. Others have stopped Natalie and Ron in airports to tell them that they would skip classes as college students to watch Gullah Gullah Island.
“Whatever careers, professions or mindsets that they have now in their adult lives were formed by their viewing us or people who looked like us who looked like themselves, and have shaped and guided them,” Ron said. Natalie echoed this sentiment: “There were millions of people to whom we were Auntie Natalie and Uncle Ron, or that virtual parent. … And it’s been really affirming, this large community of people reaching out to us and saying: ‘Wow, I was three, I was four, I was five – and you were my mama, you were my uncle.’”
‘It intrigued them and still does’
The initial idea for the show began on St Helena Island. Natalie recalled the Daises “eating cold chicken out of a bucket” with the producer Maria Perez-Brown, the actor Laurence Fishburne and the novelist Gloria Naylor, who had bought a house on the island because her novel, Mama Day, had been based on the community. The book was being optioned for a film that Perez-Brown would produce. At a certain point, Natalie said, Perez-Brown turned to the Daises and remarked: “Maybe we can do a show about you guys.”
For Ron, the show was “an exciting way of advancing” what he and Natalie had already been doing. In 1986, Ron’s first book, Reminiscences of Sea Island Heritage, was published and the couple developed a multimedia production, Sea Island Montages, shortly thereafter. The following year, the couple adapted Sea Island Montages into a traveling show, giving them a way to promote Gullah Geechee culture, then known as Sea Island culture, on the road at schools, festivals, conferences and other events across the country. “Many people who had never heard of Gullah Geechee culture [were] introduced to it, and they, in their own times, found out more,” Ron said. “It intrigued them and still does.”
While researching for Sea Island Heritage, Ron interviewed elders he had grown up with on St Helena Island, and included songs and spirituals he had sung as a child. Gullah Gullah Island maintained this practice of basing elements of the show on the Daise’s actual community. Every episode of Gullah Gullah Island had a segment that was filmed with the Daise’s neighbors and family. The local high school band, parks and beaches all made appearances, further adding to the texture of the real Gullah world.
“[The producers] really made an effort. They would ask us about the language and they would ask us about aspects of the culture,” Natalie said. They presented it “in such a way that little people could pick it up, but also in an authentic way. It was as honest and true as it could be for our audience, which actually turned out to be much bigger than [just] little people.”
A magic place to escape to
The Daises did not realize how significant the 30th anniversary of Gullah Gullah Island was. If their children hadn’t mentioned it to them, Ron said, they probably would have just had a nice dinner on 24 October this year and called it a day. Sara and Simeon, who are now in their 30s and appeared on the show as kids (Simeon was a baby), really drove home the importance of the anniversary.
“I’m really grateful to live long enough to be the kind of elder who gets to see the seeds that you planted and say: ‘Oh, well, look at that,’” Natalie said. “You know, everybody doesn’t get to see: ‘Wow, I did this thing – we did this thing – and it was important.”
Gullah Gullah Island offered viewers a look into a Black family that was affirming and guiding. The show was formed around the family’s normal interactions, with producers following the relatives around, seeing how they interacted with each other, their environment and the people in their community. Any conflict was resolved by the end of an episode – as a means to convey communication and togetherness – and punctuated by a song.
“Having this television family that sings all the time, that’s what we really did and still do,” said Ron. “There’s just activity and fun throughout the day.” Those real-life depictions also extended to the way the Daises “interacted with our children and Gullah Gullah Island community children. In real life, we listen to them because we value their thoughts.”
The show gave kids “a magic place they could escape to”, Sara said, though that did lead to some awkward interactions growing up. People who watched the show “thought that when they saw us in real life, that is exactly who we were supposed to be”, she said with a laugh. “That had its own interesting challenges to navigate, to be like: ‘Oh, y’all think that I’m going to dance with this frog in real life and sing in front of you.’ That’s not accurate.”
But however tricky it may have been for the Daise children growing up, the show left an indelible mark on American culture. Now, 30 years later, the Daise family is once again inviting viewers into their home. In October, they released the trailer for Gullah Gullah: The Portal, a new series that reimagines the cult classic, in which Simeon, along with viewers, returns home to Gullah Gullah Island.
Gullah Gullah: The Portal was created by Simeon and inspired in part by his sister’s article, The South Is a Portal, which re-imagines the South Carolina low country as a portal that fuses Gullah Geechee and Indigenous knowledge. The show is slated to be released in late 2025. In the trailer, over a montage of images from the original Gullah Gullah Island, Natalie says to Simeon in a voiceover: “I always wanted you to remember where you came from.”
Remembering has always been central to the family’s work, and they continue to depict and explore Gullah Geechee culture in their creative endeavors today. Ron, who also owns the online bakery Mr Ron’s Gullahlicious Pound Cakes, has written several Gullah Geechee books, including Raptors in the Ricelands, a book about a fictional Gullah Geechee community, that was released earlier this year. Natalie, who is also a visual artist, still performs with Ron.
Sara, a griot who gives keynotes on gender and Gullah Geechee culture, has also written a forthcoming book Sankofa Shadow Work: Diaries of a Diasporic Diviner, which uses memoir, public history, conjure and fabulation to “follow the southern journey of a queer Black diviner, griot and gatekeeper”. And Simeon, an actor who has appeared on the series All American, Snowfall and the Bobby Brown Story, is also a writer and director who promotes Gullah Geechee culture using his platform.
“I’d like to think that our family business is sankofa: [the Ghanaian concept of] going back and pulling from the past what we need for the future,” Natalie said. “In all of our work, we center the culture, and we honor the ancestors.”
